Arctic Film Festival 2026

About

The Arctic Film Festival returns for its 8th edition, on 3 & 4 May at the Nordover cinema. This year's programme consists of four strands and 14 short and feature-length films from 13 countries.

Under the theme 'Shifting Scales of Proximity: From the planetary to the personal', this year's festival programme moves between distance and intimacy. Fiction films, personal narratives, and documentaries bring landscapes, animals, relationships, gestures, and histories on screen, inviting us to reconsider how cinema frames the world and how we, as spectators, perceive, feel, and imagine what hits close to home and what does not. They invite us to reconsider how cinema frames the world and how we, as spectators, perceive, feel, imagine what hits close to home and what not.

Can the fragile existence of a lobster or a distant land under threat affect us more than the personal dramas of social encounters we already recognise from our own lives? Within shifting scales, the familiar can become strange and the distant unexpectedly intimate.

Each day's programme consists of a feature-length film and a selection of short films. Though each one has a different story, style, or genre, each programme's shorts complement one another, composing a narrative that makes us reconsider the notion of proximity.

The first day's feature-length documentary is Yorgos Avgeropoulos' 'Mankind's Folly'. The critically-acclaimed documentary examines how the Arctic permafrost -the ground frozen for millennia that once sealed in the era of mammoths— is thawing and the consequences it has not only at local communities but on a global scale. Nikita in Siberia and Martha in Alaska share their stories, sending a distress signal to all people around the world.

On the second day, the fiction film 'Anorgasmia (all the things we do to survive)' by Jon Einarsson Gustafsson takes us to the Icelandic highlands. Touching upon modern-day relationships, through the story of Sam and Naomi, the director sets the questions, 'Why do we connect with others? Why are we afraid of intimacy? And what are we willing to do to survive – emotionally?'

Through fiction stories, narratives and SDG films, the short film programmes show us different places, unravelling various cultures, current issues and personal dilemmas.

The Arctic Film Festival 2026 brings indie gems by upcoming and established filmmakers together in a diverse programme spotlighting different corners of the earth. Let's use the power of independent cinema to explore lesser-known parts of the world and of ourselves and use it as a motivating force to think, talk and act.